Strategic Process Development: A Comprehensive Guide to Business Growth
Strategic process development sounds a little bit like some intern at a Fortune 500 company slapped together some business buzzwords in an attempt to impress their boss. What even is strategic process development? What does this mean for business leaders with long-term goals who want a competitive advantage? If this is what you’re thinking, you’re in the right place. In this blog, we’re going to walk through strategic process development, what it is, why it’s important, and why it should be an integral part of your strategic planning process and long-term business strategy.
So, first, what is strategic process development? It helps to break it down into the components: strategic process, and development. Your strategic process is the process by which you create your business strategy. Its development is the method of designing, enhancing, and optimizing your strategic processes to be more efficient, affordable, and sustainable. This lets you increase your output and move towards your goals without compromising on service quality or your sanity. For it to be strategic process development, you need to plan how to grow and improve your business in a clear, repeatable way. So what does that actually look like?
Laying the Foundation
First things first, you’re going to want your processes to align with the direction you want to take your business. What are your goals? Your mission and vision statement? What strategic direction do you want to go, and what initiatives will get you there?
Mission and Vision Statements
Let’s start by laying the foundation for your whole business: your mission statement and your vision statement. A mission statement should tell viewers what your business does and what your company values are. Your “mission” as a company and why that’s your mission.
For example, Kia’s mission statement is “to deliver innovative products that inspire you when you move and deliver convenient and meaningful services.” From this statement, you can tell that the company cares about innovation, mobility, and convenience. Now, as an easily recognizable international brand Kia gets to cheat a little when it comes to making the “what” part of their mission clear, so for reference here’s Upwell’s mission statement: “At Upwell, our mission is to support brands who are striving to make an impact in the world. We’re here to empower you and help you transform that vision for greater impact into something real.” It’s subtle, but you can tell from our mission statement that our purpose is to help brands (aka other businesses) achieve their goals and that we care about making an impact in the world, helping others, and attaining real-world results.
In contrast, a vision statement tells people where your company wants to go. What direction are you headed in? What hopes and dreams are fueling your business? This is the place to daydream a little: if you could do anything with your business, what would you do? Kia’s vision statement is “to create sustainable mobility solutions for the consumers, community, and the global society.” So their vision is to make sustainable transportation – a worthy goal, assuming they fully achieve it one day.
You might be wondering how this ties in to process development; here’s the thing: these statements set the tone and direction for your business. And in doing so, they give you the starting and ending points you need to know how to be strategic. We start with our mission and then design our processes to help us achieve our vision. In Kia’s case, this would look like making use of innovation paired with a healthy dose of convenience for their consumers to create processes that lead their business toward creating sustainable transportation options.
Crafting Strategic Objectives
The next step is then to create strategic goals that are clear, time-bound, and measurable (see our blog on how to set business goals for more information on this). These strategic objectives should help guide your business toward your vision in a tangible way.
For example, Kia might set goals like increasing electric car sales to 50% of their total sales by 2030, increasing EV battery lifespans by 25% by 2035, and shifting 10% of total business operations to public transportation projects by 2028. These objectives will help the company move toward its vision and provide executives, employees, and consumers with a clear idea of how Kia intends to evolve as a business. If they made a non-binding goal that couldn’t truly be measured, like stating they want to increase research into sustainable EV battery alternatives, there’s no accountability to hold them to that goal. Not only is there no due date for when they should accomplish this goal, but they could put one person in a room to Google stuff about batteries and call it a day. Lacking clarity and concrete objectives makes your goals confusing to your employees and sketchy to your customers.
Key Steps in the process
Strategic Planning Framework
Now we’re getting into some of the actual planning. It helps to develop a strategic planning framework, essentially a few rules of thumb to always include in your processes, or at least to help shape them. Here at Upwell, we like to plan strategically for our clients by doing the below process. Think of it like reverse engineering your vision into what actionable step you can take today to lead you there.
- We start by looking at the long-term vision. Then define what our three-year goal is that will drive us towards that vision.
- Once we have our three-year goal, we break that up into what needs to happen (at a high level) each year over the next three years to reach that goal.
- We then look at what we need to achieve in the next 12 months and break that down into quarterly goals.
- Once we’re clear on our quarterly goals for the next year, we break each up into its key milestones and how to measure its success. Each of these milestones is the start of a new project plan.
- We then take each milestone and outline the action steps we need to take to achieve that. In this process, we also outline any gaps where we may need additional resources in order to achieve this milestone. We also outline any dependencies between different milestones or parts of the project plan.
- Once we have a clear project plan for achieving each milestone in the upcoming 1-2 quarters, it’s time to outline the processes, delegate action items, and set deadlines for those action items. Then we get to work!
Remember, your strategy should always move you toward your vision.
SWOT Analysis
A SWOT analysis helps you to form smart strategies that are specifically suited to where your business is right now. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Do an honest review of your business: what are you already good at? What do you need help with? Where are opportunities for you to move towards your vision? What are some possible threats that might hurt your business?
Implementing and Adjusting the Strategy
Action Plans and Execution
Now all of this brilliant strategy is useless if you never put it into action. This is where an action plan is useful, essentially a plan saying to do Objective A, we need to do X, Y, and Z. So if you’re Kia, and you want to shift 10% of all business operations into public transportation projects by 2028, you create your strategic framework and perform a SWOT analysis. From those you realize that to accomplish this goal, the best route is to focus on public bus systems in developing cities. So now you need to develop a specific plan to pursue that market, which will help you accomplish your larger goal, which moves you towards your vision (it’s like goal inception). This might include contacting city governments in areas that seem most likely to be interested, developing a marketing plan to effectively pitch your products, upping production of buses in nearby factories to prepare for expected demand, offering sales to the first few buyers to create incentives, etc. And then you take that plan and actually take action and do those things.
In a small business, this might look more like developing certain products, planning the marketing campaign for them, holding sales during the initial launch, and asking some of the people in your network to promote your offers.
KPIs and Performance Measurement
KPIs, or key performance indicators, are a great performance measurement tool to track your projects and see how you’re approaching your goals. There are a variety of tools you can use to help you track data and progress toward your KPIs, but here are some of my favorites:
If you realize that you aren’t making progress the way you’d hoped, it’s time to shift your action plan to improve your performance. Sometimes our goals are what need adjusting, while other times we just aren’t taking the right approach to them the first time around.
Final Thoughts
A robust strategic process can be a huge asset to your business and will allow you to follow a clear direction by following a well-thought-out strategy designed specifically for your business needs. And it’s a good idea to continually refine your strategies so that your business is always heading down the right path – even when you change which path that is.
This is definitely not the kind of internal business development you want to procrastinate doing the way you avoid organizing your Google Drive (we’ve all been there). But it can be overwhelming. Like, really overwhelming. So if you want to develop a strategic process but aren’t sure how to get started, take a deep breath, and check out our Systems Audit. This project where we work together on your strategic process development gives you a clear picture of what your business needs and how to meet those needs, including what’s needed when creating effective strategic processes.
